Tag: Joanna

Joanna was a mother of six, wife, and journalist, who left frontline journalism to dedicate herself to her family full time. She never regretted the move. Knowing that her home was now working better made her happy, and she knew how lucky she was. In a Homemakers Project interview, she said that her current “job” was certainly no less important than her former one.

As a journalist, she had been senior editor for Reuters in Hong Kong and Singapore, and then Head of Foreign News at Sky News in London. Only someone who has travelled the same path knows just how gripping that sort of work is. But in an editorial meeting after having her first child, she realized that her priorities were now elsewhere.

Joanna and her husband, Colin Brazier, supported Home Renaissance Foundation from the start. Convinced of the need to talk about homes and how important they are for society, they were the ones who suggested our latest study, the Global Home Index, on the values required to make a home.

For several years, Joanna’s posts on the Home Renaissance Foundation’s blog were a way of keeping in touch with her previous job. They are well worth reading – direct, touched with irony, and still keenly applicable today.

Although we worked together in the same thinktank I met Jo face to face just three or four times – a downside of teleworking. Those few meetings were gems; she really was a woman for all seasons. She won me over in the first minute of our first meeting. She always had a smile that expressed the joy of her Christian faith, she was charged with energy, and combined optimism and realism. All of these features were used by her from day to day in building the home that she captained, a-swirl with six children, horses and dogs, and a husband at the beck and call of breaking news.

She knew the pitch and how to play it. We can be sure she has left a stellar example that will be followed by her children under Colin’s guidance, and that from heaven she will continue cheering on her wonderful family with the same strength she always showed. Rest in peace, Joanna Roughton.